I didn't go see "Watchmen" today. I might try to see it on Monday-- an early showing, to avoid the noisy geek crowd. My brother saw it last night, the bum. He thought it was pretty good. The reviews I've been reading have been mixed, and some of them note the conspicuous absence of the giant "sacrificial squid" that makes its appearance at the end of the graphic novel. That's sort of disappointing, but if whatever has replaced the squid isn't lame, I'll forgive this rather major change to the story.
Tonight, I comfort myself with some BSG.
_
Marathon
11 years ago
5 comments:
(Reading posts in order, commenting in order...)
There was a squid? Holy crap, I really do not remember anything at all about that book. It's like someone erased my memory of it.
I know I read the thing... how could I have forgotten it so completely?
Anyway, go see it. The film, I mean.
Yeah, the squid was this enormous, building-sized creature created by Adrian Veidt. Its sole purpose was to die: Veidt put the creature together Frankenstein-style, giving it a huge, powerfully psychic brain and horrifying, squid-like body (we see only hints of the body). Veidt also built a teleporter, and when he finally executed his plan, he teleported the squid into the middle of the city, where it died instantly, because it materialized inside both buildings and the ground (imagine a Star Trek-style transporter accident).
Veidt created and killed the creature for the purpose of uniting humankind. The creature's brain sent out a massive psychic shock wave which, along with the brute fact of the creature's teleportation, killed millions. Humanity thought the creature was the vanguard of some sort of alien attack, which is the reaction Veidt had hoped for.
Alan Moore's story ends with a non-ending. Veidt, in a philosophical mood after having accomplished his grand plan, asks the godlike Dr. Manhattan whether he, Veidt, has done the right thing in the end. Dr. Manhattan replies that nothing ever ends, and in the final pages of the graphic novel, we see that Rorschach's diary-- the diary that contains information about Veidt's plot-- is lying loose and waiting to be found. In other words, humanity won't experience blissful coexistence for long: once the real story comes out, it'll be business as usual.
Kevin
Ah, right. I think the problem was that I only read the original work once, and it was probably too much for me to process (and thus remember).
I've been poking around on the intarwebs, and the nerdfury over the absence of the squid is insane. I won't say anything about the film ending until you've seen it, but I will say that I thought it made sense in its own right.
Also: do you just not sleep or something?
As Pearl S. Buck noted, Satan never sleeps.
I haven't explored the nerdic fury, but am not surprised by it. There's just no pleasing the purists. My friend Nathan felt the same way about Peter Jackson's version of LOTR. I really enjoyed the films (especially the third), but Nathan was miffed at the many changes Jackson made. I understand where Nathan's coming from: if and when they finally adapt the Thomas Covenant novels for the screen, I'll have my complaints.
BTW, I read Watchmen three times, each reading being done years after the previous one. The story requires a lot of work to process, and there's simply no way to get it all in a single reading-- or even in three readings.
A lot of people think Moore's graphic novel is the greatest example of the form, but I'd put Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns right alongside it. Miller does gritty much better than Moore et al. do.
Kevin
I'm definitely going to have to pick up a copy of Watchmen to catch up.
I remember being a little miffed by some of the Jackson changes in LOTR (being a Tolkien nerd myself), but I came to accept them as being part of the film culture of the work.
The problem with film versions of longer works (be they novel or graphic novel) is that you are doomed to some level of failure. If you stay faithful to the original, the critics who aren't married to the original work (i.e., the vast majority of them) will crucify you for not giving your characters "enough room to breathe" (a number of critics have said this about Watchmen). If you don't stay faithful to the original, you're going to be roasted by the fanboys, who are likely to be the solid core of your fan base. Heck, you're going to get roasted by the fanboys anyway, because most of them don't understand what the term "adaptation" means.
It is a thankless job, and were I a director, I would avoid it like the plague.
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